Velodex Robotics

Revolutionizing robotics to rewrite the economics of how the world makes food.

Full-stack robotics for high-mix food manufacturing.

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We build general-purpose robots that learn the craft of food, so a critical industry can thrive instead of survive.

Food is made by hand, at scale, in tens of thousands of high-mix kitchens that automation hasn’t reached. We are building the machine that meets the demands of a hungry, growing world.

The automation gap

Food manufacturing missed the productivity revolution.

Every other manufacturing sector roughly doubled its output per hour. Food barely moved. The reason is high mix. A single food operation may run hundreds of products in small batches, with recipes, ingredients, and formats that change throughout the day. Nothing has been built that solves this problem in a cost-effective and efficient manner, so the work has remained manual. We’re changing that.

+113%
Labor productivity growth, all U.S. manufacturing, since 1987
+17%
Labor productivity growth, U.S. food manufacturing, over the same period
Chart comparing labor productivity growth in all U.S. manufacturing versus food manufacturing since 1987

Source: BLS labor productivity index, NAICS 311

Full-stack robotics

The brain, the body, and the flywheel.

We are a full-stack robotics company, building all three to automate high-mix food manufacturing.

Brain

Models built for food

Our family of novel policy, world, and reward models for fine food manipulation, paired with code-as-policy programming for deterministic, long-horizon production workflows.

Body

Hands with a sense of touch

Our novel grippers with delicate touch for cross-embodied skill capture and autonomy, on dual-arm, food-safe robots that work alongside people in dynamic kitchens.

Flywheel

Coverage that compounds

Our active learning and ramped deployment with online exploration, plus multi-partner engagement that keeps expanding coverage across novel high-mix environments and tasks.

Thousands of tasks. A core set of capabilities.

Receive, unpack, cook, portion, assemble, pack. Written out as tasks, high-mix work is infinitely complex. Written out as capabilities, it is supervised and tractable, and we build for every one of them.

Sensing

Beyond vision

Force, contact, temperature, and chemical signals that cameras alone cannot observe.

Projected multi-modal sensor streams from an early training episode
Dexterity

Privileged skill catalog

Prehensile and non-prehensile manipulation, bi-manual coordination, tool use, dynamic and delicate handling.

1x grasping step from an autonomous task
Judgment

Taste and artistry

Plating, presentation, and the subjective calls that customer preference actually rewards.

Proprioception to fill a cup to the right level without kitchen scales
Horizon

Whole workflows

End-to-end production runs with deterministic exception handling, across every step of a workflow.

Realtime live perception on novel workflow objects
In the lab

Every frame here is real.

Real work, real data. This is our own team teaching the models, in a production kitchen, on the same messy, variable products every kitchen deals with daily.

The body

What we are building for high-mix food manufacturing.

General-purpose dexterity, designed around the way food is actually produced. It rolls up to the workstation you already have within your space constraints and goes to work.

Fits anywhere
Rolls up to the workstations and benches you already run. Height-adjustable, low footprint, with no facility modifications.
Precise & Skilled
Fine manipulation of soft, variable product, with weight and quality dual-verified in line.
Food-safe
Washdown rated for fast changeover between products. Built to GMP-qualified test and validation processes.
Collaborative
Realtime workspace awareness, working alongside your team at the same station. Complies with ISO/ANSI collaborative system standards.
Grows with you
New products and tasks taught in minutes by the people who know the work best. New skills arrive with every software update.
Fleet control
Manage fleets, production runs, and target outcomes from one dashboard. Connects to the inventory software you already run.
Founding team

Leaders in AI robotic manipulation and food tech, pioneering the frontier of applied robotics.

Parker Owan

Parker Owan, Ph.D.

Co-Founder & CEO
  • Founded Amazon Vulcan, Robot of the Year
  • Tech Lead, Cruise AI Behaviors
  • UW Ph.D., imitation learning for robotics
Jeff Hardy

Jeff Hardy

Co-Founder & President
  • Built Tapingo, nine-figure exit to Grubhub
  • Led product partnerships at Google and Yahoo
  • Raised over $100M in startup funding
Get in touch

Transforming the food industry to feed the world.

Early partners get priority access and founding pricing, and help shape what we build.

founders@velodex.com